NASA is Poised to Smack a Near-Earth Asteroid - Here's What that Does, and Doesn't, Mean for Planetary Readiness

NASA's DART Mission will be the first physical test of a way to deflect an asteroid out of a collision course with Earth. An expert says it's "training wheels" for a problem like the climate crisis.

Much of my reporting on threats ranging from climate jolts to pandemics to great quakes has focused on what a reader of mine in 2008 described as humanity's "blah blah blah BANG" pattern of risk management. Here's a bit of hopeful space-rock news that I see as an early hint we might be breaking free of old habits. What's your view? Please weigh in below and share this post.

A series of 14 images of the asteroid Didymos and its tiny companion, Dimorphos, the target of the DART mission, taken in November, 2003 (Arecibo Observatory / NASA)

UPDATED 11/25 - If all goes well with NASA's DART Mission, which launched on November 23 (local time) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, a little under a year from now and 6.8 million miles away, a satellite the size of a vending machine will smash into Dimorphos, an asteroid "moonlet" the size of an Egyptian pyramid paired by gravity with a larger space rock, Didymos.

Success will be declared if that impact nudges the behavior of the asteroids enough to demonstrate we can do the same when astronomers spot one on a collision course with Earth.

That day will come as surely as such collisions have happened through planetary history, with a 2013 close call over Siberia the most recent warning shot.

Alex Alishevskikh - 2013 Chelyabinsk Meteor Trail CC BY-SA 2.0

As the first physical test of a defense system, DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, signals a juncture long sought by a globe-spanning network of scientists, engineers, astronauts, lawmakers and supporters who've been working for nearly two decades to elevate planetary defense from the realm of space-program side project and disaster film plot to an urgent priority.

The newest cosmic-collision film, of course, is "Don't Look Up," which launches December 10th in theaters and centers on an incoming comet that is a stand-in for catastrophic climate change, according to writer-director Adam McKay. It's no surprise that McKay did a promotional spot for DART. And it's no surprise that a key adviser on the film is Amy Mainzer, a University of Arizona planetary sciences professor who directed an early NASA near-Earth object survey and is in charge of developing the new Near-Earth Object Surveyor space-based telescope project. (I'll use NEO below.)

If the bargain-basement NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab DART mission succeeds (at $324 million over eight years, it is amazingly cheap as planet-saving projects go), it will demonstrate deflection, one of the three keystone needs for an effective planetary defense system. The others are detection (you can't deflect what you can't spot in time) and coordination (a k a governance). With a couple of exceptions, countries haven't proved very effective at confronting global threats - yet.

On all three fronts, there's enough activity that I really feel we're in the early stages of turning a corner on this particular high-impact, low-probability threat to the human journey, although there's an urgent need to do much, much more.

In the last 25 years, both within the United States and internationally, efforts to track and respond to dangerous incoming objects slowly matured and intensified as a variety of warning signs emerged, from the stunning 1994 collisions of Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet fragments with Jupiter (below) to the 2013 blast over Russia.

Also helpful was early pressure from the Association of Space Explorers, a global network of astronauts and cosmonauts, and B612 Foundation, founded in 2002 by the astronauts Rusty Schweickart and Ed Lu and others to pursue asteroid defense technologies and policies. They helped build several global networks and projects coordinated through the United Nations. Here's a presentation Schweickart made to a United Nations subcommittee in 2007:

But many in this arena caution that we remain dangerously behind in turning that preparedness corner, particularly when it comes to settling on chains of command and protocols for coordinated decision-making when a threat is identified.

Who's in charge

Politico just published an unnerving deep dive into the state of planetary defense by Bryan Bender, a senior correspondent focused on military and NASA issues. He pegs the story to the DART launch, writing:

"[T]he yearlong mission scheduled to begin on Nov. 24 is raising an existential question for scientists and security experts: whose job is it to defend the planet against a possibly life-ending space rock if one was headed our way?

The answer right now is no one."

The article lays out many unresolved questions and concerns, particularly in relation to the relative roles of the Department of Defense, with its new Space Force, and NASA, which only loosely has had "protecting" the planet as part of its mainly-exploratory mission. (I once wrote about the politics-driven comings and goings of the word "protect" in NASA's mission statement.)

Bender reports that China, no surprise, appears set on giving its military a lead role.

Trust in Russia has been damaged by the recent weapon test that took out a defunct Soviet-era satellite. Condemnation continues to spread like the cloud of debris, as Chelsea Gohd reported on Monday for Space.com.

Danica Remy, the president of B612 Foundation, said the Politico article made important points but missed the role of initiatives undertaken over the past decade and a half through the United Nations.

"The United Nations has made significant progress working with space agencies around the world to develop asteroid response programs," Remy said in an email. She pointed to both the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) and the Space Mission Planning Advisory Group (SMPAG). “These two U.N. coordinating bodies will work together in communicating and planning efforts when humanity finds an asteroid heading towards earth," she said.

Who has transparency and trust

At 86, the Apollo veteran Rusty Schweickart has retired from his roles at the B612 Foundation but is still as passionate about this work as he was when I began talking to him about NEOs in 2008. When I emailed him the Politico story, he laid out his argument for NASA being given the lead, and for Congress finally to make this explicit. His note is worth posting unabridged:

"Public confidence and trust are going to be BIG issues when the day arrives when a significant sized NEO is predicted to hit Earth with significant probability. Because of orbital dynamics, any deflection, as it is executed, effectively drags the impact point across the surface of the Earth until it is off the leading or trailing edges of the planet. In that process people not originally at risk from the impact are (hopefully) temporarily put at risk as the impact point passes across them. Because of this reality deflection is NOT a national problem… but a planetary one.

"And the people/nations across whom the impact point is dragged in the process of dragging it off the Earth… need to have confidence in those tasked with taking this action. Public confidence in the U.S. (or any other) military doing this is ludicrous… compared with public confidence in NASA taking this action.

"The military deal with protection of populations against foreign enemies. Rocks impacting Earth are a natural hazard, NOT enemies! The militaries of the world understandably deal and act in secret; NASA acts in the open and is renowned for international cooperation.

"The Politico article is correct in one major item; it is time, past time, for the U.S. Congress to explicitly state what agency of the U.S. government is responsible for the pro-active defense of the U.S. in the event of predicted NEO impacts. And… it should be NASA. NOT the military (U.S. Space Force or any other element)."

Here's hoping lawmakers are listening.

Why asteroids are easier than climate change

To get caught up on how the DART mission relates the broader challenges of planetary sustainability, I had a Columbia Sustain What video chat a few days ago with the other B612 founder from the NASA Astronaut Corps, Ed Lu. We were joined by Danica Remy, B612's president.

Watch on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter.

I hope you can listen to the whole conversation. Lu made some essential points about how asteroid solutions have been spurred by small groups of innovators. It hasn't taken a Manhattan Project.

Andy Revkin - Do you wake up more comfortable these days that we're inching toward integrating those kinds of risks better?

Ed Lu - I'm feeling more and more hopeful, not because I believe that humans are actually getting any better at looking at long-term problems, but because the solutions to some of these long-term problems now no longer require as many resources.

Costs are coming down for doing a lot of these things. If it no longer costs the resources of a country and you no longer need to convince a country in order to solve the problem, right?

And that's exactly what the B612 Foundation is demonstrating, that small groups of people today can actually make a marked difference in these problems, whereas in 1960, you know, that would not have been possible. These things would just have been too expensive to do. So, you know, we can make actually improvements in the tracking and determination of asteroid orbits that were the province of entire nations decades ago.

That actually allows these problems to be solved. What if it was possible to have an effect on on climate, you know, say, CO2 production, if instead of requiring trillions of dollars, it took a few million. Well, that problem could be solved tomorrow, right? And that's exactly what's happening in the case of the asteroid threat.

Andy Revkin - That's a really important point that's come up in my climate reporting. Dan Schrag, who's a planetary scientist at Harvard, long ago gave a presentation at the U.N. where he said with an issue like climate change, there are these knobs that are adjustable - political will is one. Technology is one. If you boost the technology knob, you can lower the political-will threshold. If things are cheaper or more scalable, you can get progress. And I thought that was pretty powerful. So maybe there are some lessons here for the climate challenge too.

Ed Lu - We're already seeing it there on the climate side. There's tremendous investment in small nuclear reactors - private investment. That's true. Most of those are private. No. And think about what the difference it would make if it was possible to have a, you know, a clean. Inexpensive source of electrical power. Clean, steady, reliable source of electrical power makes all the difference.

Andy Revkin - What are the distinctions between asteroid risk and climate risk? One is very abrupt, dramatic thing that's lurking. It's inevitable. The other is more of a human driven phenomenon that has this long timescale.

Ed Lu - [Asteroid defense] is far more of a cut and dried technical issue in the sense that there isn't really any question about how we calculate orbits. We understand orbits very, very well. We understand Newton's laws. We understand orbital mechanics.

The climate is a far more complicated system with a lot of approximations that we have to make and the source of a lot of debate.

Look at what DART is doing. You know, launch a rocket, run into an asteroid. Bingo. So, you know, if it was that easy to solve the climate issue - launch a rocket, wait a few months, hit some object, we're done - we wouldn't be having those debates. We'd just do it.

The one similarity, though, is that you need to think in the long term for you to say, what are the threats that are off on the horizon? You know, that could happen, that happen over the long term. In that sense, there is a commonality, but I think there are far more differences.

Danica Remy - The asteroid problem is a little bit of training wheels for us as humans, collectively as humans, because it is a relatively simple compared to other existential-risk problems to solve. As Rusty always says, we just need to get to it.

☄️ ☄️ ☄️

READ

George Dvorsky wrote a useful Gizmodo list of significant aspects of the DART Mission. The best part of the piece is his kicker:

"This is, in my humble estimation, one of the most important missions in the entire history of space exploration. Learning about our solar system and searching for signs of life are obviously very important, but developing the capacity to prevent an asteroid from smashing into Earth would be a massive accomplishment, as it could someday save us from potential extinction. DART is a small but very important step in this direction.

"DART is also important in that it’s our first foray into solar system re-engineering. The Anthropocene, the ongoing human-caused geological epoch, will eventually trickle into space, as we tweak the orbits of asteroids, mine celestial bodies for valuable resources, terraform dead planets, and possibly even seek to extend the life of our Sun. But first things first — let’s give Dimorphos a tiny shove and take it from there."

Also read my September post: To Cut Odds of a Big Bang on Earth, Heed Jupiter's Flashing Warning Sign - The citizen-science effort tracking Jovian collisions could help humanity avoid the fate of the dinosaurs.

EXPLORE

There are dozens of videos, articles, websites, podcasts and other media focused on DART and planetary defense. One bit of content I really enjoyed is a particularly informative NASA Q&A with Andy Rivkin (no relation that we know of!), a Johns Hopkins University planetary astronomer who is co-lead investigator on the DART mission. Watch here (it's where I got the vending machine and pyramid comparisons above):

Do listen to Rivkin's "Dart Song," as well.

Watch my 2013 interview, right after that 2013 close call over Russia. with Rusty Schweickart. We discuss whether humans can be smarter than the dinosaurs when it comes to this hazard: Pondering Planetary Defense After Meteor and Asteroid Close Calls

For a tough critique of global efforts (so far) on cutting risk from extreme hazards, read Extreme Geohazards: Reducing the Disaster Risk and Increasing Resilience - European Science Foundation, 2015. This sobering report, pointing to the lack of international coordination and governance facing cross-border disaster risks, really shook me. I reached out to one of the report authors, the marine scientist and resilience analyst Deborah Brosnan, for her assessment of DART as a sign of hope. She replied:

"With respect to extreme natural hazards on planet Earth, such as the volcanic eruption scenario that we considered [a VEI 7 eruption, akin to the 1815 Tambora blast that caused a "Year Without Summer"], there has been little progress in preparing for such events that will have world-wide consequences. We can hope that the pandemic raises awareness that these global-scale threats are not 'if' but 'when' situations, and they have major consequences on the economic, social and environmental fabric. In a nutshell we are poorly prepared and the situation is more concerning today because we are in the midst of one global crisis - climate change. Any additional major event on top of this could be catastrophic for everyone."

How a Historic Jupiter Comet Impact Led to Planetary Defense is a fascinating 2019 NASA article describing how the collision of fragments of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet with Jupiter in 1994 drove U.S. action.

To get the back story behind the latest catastrophe comedy, read How ‘Don’t Look Up’s Adam McKay Got Leo, JLaw, Streep, Chalamet, Rylance To Sound Climate Change Alarm With Comedy On Comet Hurtling To Earth - a really engaging Mike Fleming interview with Adam McKay about the film. Here's McKay's short, fun promotional video for DART:

To explore what humanity will face should an orbiting object similar to those that sparked past great extinctions make it through even the best defenses, read Scatter, Adapt and Remember - How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, a 2014 book by science writer and novelist Annalee Newitz. Newitz gave a fine Google talk on this issue:

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Parting shot

I took this photo of my younger son as a full moon rose along the Maine coast several years ago.